Janine’s blog

I have decided to re-enroll in this course which is being offered through Skills Tasmania. I like to regularly do online courses as a means of keeping up to date and ongoing reflection on online learning and teaching. There are few better ways to learn about being an online teacher or designing learning for online than being an online student! My good intentions first time round were hijacked by the usual demands of a busy working life so this time, I am scheduling two one hour slots per week as a disciplined way to maintain the commitment. I wonder if it will fee like enough time to stay on track and contribute to the learning community? Unfortunately I am unable to attend the startup face to face workshop but I think that is a really good feature that the facilitators have built in.

Westwood Cyber High (Michigen, USA) - modelled on the Not School program from the UK, this school is a community school for eligible students. They study a “My School” or “Not School” pathway, both of which are based on project based learning.  News items, district newsletter

A teacher said to me recently that they wanted to be shown examples of “world’s best practice” in online teaching in a distance setting. There is plenty of material about the theory and technical “how to” documentation, videos and examples for particular tools (pick your learning platform, it does not really matter. What is not easy is to find freely available examples of putting it all together to produce a “best practice” course, unit, module or program. So much depends on context, starting with the needs of the learner. The following strategies work well in parallel to learning the mechanics of whatever online platform(s) is being used:

1. Studying a range of examples – and reflecting on them with a critical friend. A good source is the Moodle Cool course competition site  which showcases specific aspects of best practice. The courses are open and can do much to add to the online teaching repertoire.
2. Undertaking online courses from a variety of providers and reflecting on the experience from outcomes, content and process perspectives is a solid foundation – to be a good online teacher, you need to have experience as an online learner. This can be done in parallel to learning to teach online and be part of ongoing professional learning
3. Being invited into a colleague teacher’s online classroom and having professional dialogue about why the learning is presented and structured as it is. You may not choose to use the same approaches but you can be sure to pick up some new ideas. Of course, you need to know someone or be in a workplace where online learning is core business.
4. Working through the various self paced courses freely available  – a new one on the Moodle.org site that focuses on pedagogy rather than how to use the tools, is Teaching and Learning with Moodle (log in required)

For an overview of the territory, the most comprehensive site I have come across in this regard remains the Designing e-learning site from the Australian Flexible Learning Framework.

The Virtual School project is an interactive site that uses rich media to explore “how different technologies are making an impact on teachers and learners in schools today. “  http://policy.becta.org.uk/virtual_school/. 

The project is one of the outputs of the Narrowing the Gap research released in January 2010

Thinkquest projects screenshot

Today I attended (on behalf of NEAT)  a training day about Oracle’s ThinkQuest Projects online learning environment.

Thinkquest Projects is very easy to use and is particularly appealing to Primary students. It is designed to support Project Based Learning with an emphasis on seven 21st Century skills: critical thinking,  teamwork, communication, creativity, technology, self direction, and cross cultural understanding.

 http://www.thinkquest.org

To use ThinkQuest Projects, schools need to  register (signed off by principal), and a nominated staff member then manages access by teachers and students. Security is a priority and one of the many benefits is that classes of students can participate in projects initiated by other schools and they have the option to make their own projects available to others.

ThinkQuest Projects can be used to support the project management of entries in the long standing  ThinkQuest competition. However, the ThinkQuest competition does not require the use of ThinkQuest Projects.

There is a public facing ThinkQuest Library that showcases projects

Other related resources from the  training day:

Presentation Zen by Guy Kowasaki – http://www.presentationzen.com